Talk:Meme
Memes are indeed an interesting theory.
What I have read indicates: The theory is quite new and poorly tested. It is very loosely defined, and people who talk about memes don't entirely agree one to the next just what the entity is that they are talking about.
Your article addresses this subject as though it were well-established fact, as opposed to what it has seemed to me - a rather new fad in psychological/philosophical circles still trying to define itself and isolate its subject matter.
I think talk about memes is bad psychology and even worse philosophy. :-/
Most such talk is pretty bad. But that's because most of those who use the term don't understand what Dawkins was really talking about, and extrapolate the idea far beyond good science. Of course psychology doesn't exactly have a stellar reputation of solid science anyway... --LDC
I do not really understand why talking about memes is wrong or bad or why talking about any kind of philosophical fact is wrong or bad. I am sorry for that but I had really been lured by the idea of meme, when I first read it, because it seemed to shed light on many questions in my mind. I do not personally think that it is the best way to understand the meme theory in the initial form described by Dawkins and write that to Wikipedia. As the meme theory suggests the ideas evolve and the meme theory is not an exception for that. So, writing the different versions of this theory as understood by different scholars seems to me more beneficial. I can not understand the harsh criticism brought to the meme theory. As the theory itself suggests that there are no good or bad ideas. There are ideas that are more prone to spread among people and thus survive for a longer time and the meme theory seems to be a good candidate for this. So, can anyone please "enlighten" me about what is so wrong with this theory? Secondly, I believe that, when someone changes the initial form of an article completely, he/she would better briefly explain in the talk section the bad parts (wrong ideas, bad English etc.) of this initial form. This may be much more didactic for the readers. ErdemTuzun
I don't really disagree with this, and in fact that's why my article explicitly mentions that some later conceptions of the term (such as memetic "organisms") are often the ones most talked about. I wouldn't have any objection to more coverage of that aspect, and more mentions of popular beliefs and misconceptions. But I do think it is important to emphasize the original idea and the solid science behind it more than popular conceptions, extrapolations, and speculations. And Larry's right--this is dangerous ground, and many people use the concept to justify sociological nonsense, the same way that some people use quantum mechanics to justify subjectivity, and the way many earlier writers used Darwin to justify racism, so it must be handled with care. Also, your original text wasn't as clear or explanatory as some of your other stuff (particularly your medical information which is great). That's understandable; it may be a combination of the vagueness of the subject itself and your English (which is actually better than that of many native speakers I know, but still...). I just couldn't understand what you were trying to say, how it was organized, and how it related to Dawkins' original ideas. I think my text is clearer, more useful, and more faithful to the original concept. Feel free to add anything you think important that I may have missed. -- LDC
this is an excerpt from an exchange on the talk:Self-replication page, but it is more appropriate to this page. I have a series of questions about this concept, and I invite someone who knows more about memes and memetics to consider elaborating the article itself in response
Fair enough. But why then use the word"meme?" Why not use the more common, but apparently equally appropriate, words "thoughts" or "ideas?" SR
- For the same reason I wouldn't use the word "chemicals" when I'm talking about genes; meme is a specific technical term that applies to the specific type of thought or idea that is relevant to the concept of self-replication. Bryan Derksen
Fair enough -- but honstly, I am still unclear: is a meme a class of ideas, or is it a complex and organized set of ideas, the whole being greater than the sum of its parts (you seem to be suggesting this)? I went to the "meme" article and frankly do not feel that it answers my question, and explains this, clearly. Perhaps you will have time at some point to develop that article to make this clearer, SR
- I wrote the bulk of that article, and I tried to be as clear as possible while sticking to the original meaning of the term and not the wild extrapolations people are prone to heaping on it. It's really quite a simple idea--a meme is simply an idea that gets passed on, possibly in mutated form, from one person to another. They can be as simple as things like handshakes and bows, or as complex as Catholicism.
- Taking a look at it now. I think the key concept of a meme is that it is a "unit" of thoughts/ideas that is passed on as a single entity, such that subdividing it results in something that isn't "functional." This is an analogue to how a gene is a unit of heredity; a single gene encodes some characteristic, and groups of genes can encode some characteristic, but "half a gene" doesn't do anything and isn't even particularly meaningful as a concept (half of a gene's DNA sequence may be meaningful and functional, but that's not what pure theoretical genetics is focused on). For example, the idea "green M&Ms are aphrodisiacs" is a meme; it gets passed around as an urban legend among people. But the idea "green M&Ms" isn't a meme, or at least isn't a particularly _functional_ meme, because it doesn't get passed along as a self-contained unit. You may get people standing around water coolers and saying "by the way, have you heard that green M&Ms are aphrodisiac?" to each other but you don't get them saying "by the way, have you heard of green M&Ms?"
- Hope that little ramble was helpful, and accurate. :) Bryan Derksen
Well, this is very helpful -- but still unsatisfying. It sounds like you are talking about a "proposition." At least, this is the term people have beenusing to refer to things that people think that are passed along as a single entity, which can be subdivided into different parts (e.g. facts) although those parts do not convey the meaning (or have the function) of the proposition. If I understand you correctly, it seems kind of silly to invent a new word to replace a very good word that people have been using for thousands of years. If youmeans omething different, I guess I still need clarification. SR
- What I'm saying is that there is no way to draw an absolutely clear line between the set of all things that self-replicate and the set of all things that do not self-replicate. Yes, there are clearly some things that can be called self-replicating; cyanobacteria, etc. And there are some things which are clearly not self-replicating, such as a chunk of rock. But between those two extremes, things get fuzzy. A Chevy Impala is not self-replicating in the same sense that bacteria self-replicate, if you stick one in a field next to a pile of iron ore and come back a year later there's still only going to be one Chevy Impala. But it might be called self-replicating in the memetic sense; if you drive your Chevy Impala around town and lots of people see it and like it and order their own from Chevy, then that Chevy Impala has in a certain sense used humans as a tool to make more copies of itself. You can't separate something from its environment when considering whether it's self-replicating or not. By the same token, organisms that reproduce sexually can and usually are considered to be self-replicating, because one generally considers them as a population rather than as a collection of isolated individuals. A population of mice is self-replicating even though a single mouse on its own will die childless. A virus inside a host is self-replicating, even though in isolation it's chemically inert. Even a simple inorganic crystal can be considered self-replicating under the right circumstances; smash it to bits and drop the bits into a supersaturated solution, and soon you'll have a whole bunch of crystals similar in size and nature to the original crystal growing from the various bits. This last example is, of course, way out near the "non-self-replicating" edge of the continuum, but still in the grey. Bryan Derksen
Okay, this is interesting, but it seems to me that it is not the Chevy Impala that is replicating, but the desire for Chevy Impalas or the idea of driving a Chevy Impala. I am still not clear what is gained by calling this "self-replicating" rather than "replicating" -- espcialy since "replicating" alone allows one to consider the social proceses through which such replication occurs. You mention that a population of mice is self-replicating, but populations are socially interactive, so here you allow for "self" to include a social domain. This reaises questions about what happens to dieas within social processes, and it makes me think of Bateson's Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Also, the observation that "it might be called self-replicating in the memetic sense; if you drive your Chevy Impala around town and lots of people see it and like it and order their own from Chevy" makes it sound like you are really talking about a mimetic process, not a memetic one.
It strikes me that for you to rely on "memetic" rather than "mimetic," you do have to go on to say that "that Chevy Impala has in a certain sense used humans as a tool to make more copies of itself." Is this the crux of the matter? If it is, it seems to me that it is nice poetry but the worst kind of pseudo-science, perhaps an example of commodity fetishism
Of course, a host of people have argued that sociobiology and memetics involves a naturalization of bourgeoise ideology (Ashley Montagu, Marshal Sahlins, Richard Lewontin) -- I am not neutral and wouldn't try to contribute to an article on memes, but perhaps at some point someone can provide the defense against these charges. Certainly, the claim that the proposition (or if you prefer meme) that "cars use people to reproduce" is in some sense "scientifically," and not just poetically, meaningful requires a bit more explanation!
- I tend to agree with both the proposition that cars use people and also that ashphalt uses cars - the least flexible component of a system tends to force everything else to adapt. I also agree that memetics "naturalizes a bourgeoise ideology" but can offer a neutral critique based on chimps culture (very slow moving, seemingly without memetic prerequisites), and outcomes of simply letting memes have their way with us. Add thte more Marxist critique where you can - it's more than welcome.
In addition, then, I have three suggestions, given your reflections, that I think will make this and other articles more useful to a general audience.
1) for this article, a clearer discussion of what is at stake in "self," and to what extent it relies on or subsumes social processes -- or possibly obscures and distorts them.
2) for the obviously closely related article on memes, you seem very well-suited to make some very needed revisions, including, I suggest, a discussion of how memetics is related to/different from mimetics and also Bateson's work on ideas.
3) and if you don't mind I would still appreciate an explanation of how memes are different from propositions (see my response to your earlier "ramble")
I appreciate your thoughtful willingness to engage my queries -- I still am not clear, but I also think your responses should not be limited to the talk page or this article; I really do hope you can use this as a basis to make some necessary revions of/expansion to the article on memes, SR
- Well, I'll see what I can do. But keep in mind, I'm really not an expert in memetics; this whole discussion grew out of me simply adding a line merely mentioning them, since I had just finished doing the chain letters article and it occurred to me that memes should me mentioned as something that can support self-replication. I've never read Dawkins' books on the subject, or any significant papers on memetics, I've just picked up a general understanding through idle interest. This is one of the main reasons I haven't moved any of the more detailed stuff I've written here over into the main article, I have no idea what an expert would think of it.
- Anyway, in the case of the Chevy Impala, I would consider it memetic replication because each of the people who bought an Impala after seeing the first one would become examples for yet more people. The spread of fashions and styles throughout a culture is one of the most commonly given examples of memetic replication I've come across. And as for the difference between memes and propositions, you're asking for more detail than I'm comfortable providing at this point. Put the question in talk:Meme and see if someone more deeply into memetics can provide a satisfactory answer. Bryan Derksen
this explanation of the memetics of the Chevy Impala is a little more satisfying, but it still seems that there is a social process going on and the language of memes obscures that process -- i.e. it sounds like commodity fetishism's self-justification, SR
I hope someone will address these issues in the article -- to someone not invested in "memes" and "memetic theory," the articles really do not go far enough to explain why this theory is scientific and better/more useful than previous theories (both scientific and hermeneutic).
- I tried to relate it to more serious theories of evolution, to theology, to general problems of technology proliferation, and gave it some grounding by relating chimp research - which suggests that chipm culture doesn't evolve (at lesat not fast enough to see) and doesnt have certain prerequisites for memes. There are typos in the article as I left it but I am sure that the wreckers who destroy all things here that challenge meme totalism will fix those as they remove all meaningful content... ;-p OK never mind I fixed it.
有中文的解释嘛？
All of the stuff below is either simply wrong, irrelevant, or is bleeding-edge speculation that has no place in an encyclopedia:
How "natural" is this type of selection? Perhaps as natural as sexual attraction or ethical habits, e.g. altruism, essential to forming family and culture in the first place. The relationship of the meme to other ideas of evolution, e.g. those that separate ecological, sexual, ethical and moral factors and reserve no special or separate role for "culture" beyond these, seems to be as "pretender to the throne" - pretending to explain these more specific ideas of evolution and culture - but without any model to test. This causes quite a few scientists and others to scoff at culture as any kind of actor in human life:
A famous observation of this type was that of Margaret Thatcher, who bluntly stated "society does not exist" - evidently she saw "it" as a set of survival, seduction and moral choice factors specific to individuals, couples and families, and not as a unified "culture" or "society" in any sense.
The "be happy" and "make others happy" memes
Some spiritual practices, e.g. Buddhism, clearly promote ecological and moral goals recognizable to most people, e.g. The Noble Eightfold Path emphasizes limited consumption, reduced cruelty, no delegation of violence or participation in violent systems, and a withdrawal from sexual and ethical processes that have no clear ecological or moral value to the practitioner - regardless of the value they may have to others. Transcendental meditation is the ideal: in effect, ignoring the senses and being happy.
The Judeo-Christian-Islamic "Western" religions, however, focus more on sexual rules and ethical codes, and some believe they promote ecological destruction and self-alienation - the traditional "East versus West" debate in religion. People are urged to devote themselves to the needs of others.
The contrast between "be happy" and "make others happy", although not as stark in practice or theory as the traditional debate suggests, may satisfy constraints of different ecological or sexual norms in some non-obvious way. But it seems entirely unlikely that "they aren't particularly valuable to the believer." At least, the majority of people on Earth clearly don't think so.
Meme as meme
If we imagine that the meme theory is both true and horrendously destructive, the concept of a meme is itself a meme, and carriers of that meme seem prone to defend it in the form defined by Dawkins because of its singular elegance.
Whether human moral criteria can judge memes "good" or "bad", in general or in specific, is simply not a question that an encyclopedia committed to a neutral point of view can even attempt to answer. But, scientifically, to comprehend the significance of memes to cultural evolution, we must overcome human cognitive bias and culture bias by looking at other species. The nearest human relatives, chimpanzees, according to researchers Roger Fouts and Jane Goodall, live in bands with complex relationships, have nurturing family lives, and substantial wild culture - but seemingly without memes at all. They and other Great Apes seem to be simply immune to the process of making up words or phrases for "new ideas" - absolutely essential to the concept of a meme as defined by Dawkins et al. They create no technologies, but also no wars or genocides, which seems strongly to suggest that so-called "cultural evolution" isn't happening - much.
Ideas of evolution of societies that preceded the formal idea of memes, cultural evolution or the more specific notions of ethical evolution or moral evolution tended to emphasize the dual nature of knowledge - as both deadly danger and a means of leveraging labour to unheard-of efficiency. It is entirely valid to look at the downside of meme propagation for those who carry the meme, and those who get too close to a meme carrier.
Should memes be controlled?
It is unclear then whether cultural evolution will be steered, as the Gaians and Greens and anti-globalization movement seem to prefer, towards some heuristic or consensus process that destroys or filters harmful memes. The first effective step towards this in the sciences may come in 2002 when the administration of President G. W. Bush requested that scientists studying anthrax remove details of their experimental apparatus from research publications - prompting strong protests from scientists who claimed that such restrictions curtailed the entire scientific process and raised significant concerns regarding empirical validation of results by other parties reproducing those experiments. Some hysterical voices called it "the end of science as we know it" - but that is a common assertion in an age where science is curtailed by everything from funding cuts to animal rights advocates. Slowly, perhaps, something is trimming the meme tree.
Memes must be free?
However, scientists have strong traditions of resisting such tree-trimming - and generally believe in academic freedom rather than more closely directed or secret research driven by military or corporate goals. If nothing else the latter seem to inject unwelcome memes that constitute a serious culture bias, e.g. Harvard researcher, John Collier, who spent 15 years studying the basic biology of the anthrax toxin and solved its puzzle, while "decades of intensive military research on anthrax" failed to identify how the toxin worked or how individuals could be protected from it. "In the post-September 11 world it's tempting to think of curiosity-driven research as an anachronistic luxury," but Collier "may have cracked the mystery of anthrax toxin precisely because he wasn't out to curb the threat of bioterrorism."
Can memes be resisted?
Resistance to science and technology has been a common meme (or anti-meme).
The Internet, perhaps the ultimate meme vector, seems to be hosting both sides of this debate. Although it would seem to a naive observer that no adult user of the Internet could oppose its use by other adult, that does in fact happen, based on any number of criteria from ethics to intent to ability to resist hacking or pornography. Can we restrict the most dangerous memes to the wisest people? And who are "we" to decide?
All right, there are clearly multiple theories (or "memes" if you must) competing for space here. And it can't fit in one article, and probably shouldn't. I don't object to moving the stuff above, however I do object to having it called "nonsense". Frankly, we need better words to describe other people's work than "vandalism" and "nonsense" and "crap". However if this is the standard, I shall follow it rigorously, and w:dominator culture vandalism, w:Karl Popper's nonsense, and w:artificial intelligence crap will be subject to a rather intense rewrite to reflect the neutral point of view of the three billionth person on Earth on the socioeconomic scale...
So, a truce proposal:
How about we leave w:meme more or less as it is, using religion as its prime and controversial example, and the above can be rewritten as part of a more general article on w:meme theory following roughly what was done with w:gaia theory - thus differentiating the first w:Meme Hypothesis of w:Dawkin, w:Susan Blackmore, from any more specific ideas of testable w:Meme Theory that propose to falsify the meme hypothesis itself - I will let someone else write those as I don't think the thesis is amenable to falsification. It is at presently seemingly just a metaphor to make "cultural evolution" seem as real as genes - in which case Dame Thatcher's response is appropriate, as are those of the Marxist critics.
- There is no such thing as "meme theory". The word "meme" has entered popular culture, so it needs to be covered. But even Dawkins calls his use of the word speculations and musings, because it is. He's a real scientist, and doesn't dignify his musings by pretending that they are real science--he keeps the two separate. It's not his fault that the press and people in general foam at the mouth to hear about the speculative stuff instead of the real science. Everything in this field is speculative, and doesn't belong in an encyclopedia except as the briefest introduction and pointers to more info. If there are other theories and speculations, add them as links to other articles. There's simply no need for anything else here. If you absolutely must cover someone else's conception of the term, then title the articles very specifically: "X's theory of memetics" or "Y's theory of culture evolution", etc.
The larger w:meme theory article will deal with the controversy sparked by memes, the way most people encounter memes or understand the concept naively (as the above text does fairly well I think), memes about memes, and contrast with more detailed theories of evolution (proposing multiple threads or tracks of it), w:social capital theory (notably w:Paul Adler's totem article "The Good, the Bad And the Ugly"), and w:creativity theory (notably w:Liane Gabora). I'd also like to know what the consensus is on http://www.lucifer.com and http://www.memecentral.com as sources - they seem to be making good progress on exploiting the meme meme to further the warning aspect of it.
Also, it would be good for editorial reputation (those of you who care about this, pay attention) if w:string theory, w:meme theory, and w:gaia theory got exactly the same even-handed treatment and did not assign any one researcher, even the originator, of such short-word theories a monopoly on what they mean. If someone wants to define a four word phrase like w:cognitive science of mathematics into existence and "own" it for a while, fine, that does little harm if his views fit into what people understand by cognitive science, by philosophy, and how cognitive science purports to replace philosophy in some contexts. However, if someone wants to nab a pre-existing word like "string", an ancient proper name like "gaia", or a mnemonic rhyming new word like "meme" <-- which seems to just call attention to itself, i.e. "me! me!", we should be more willing to let other strange theories attach themselves to those short convenient words than we would to muddy the waters on longer phrases. A simple stupid standard might apply to invert the relationship between brevity of a concept and ownership: a four or five-letter word could require the treatment of at least four opposing views, a six- or seven-letter word could require three, eight or more only two each. We can tolerate dualism with respect to long phrases of possibly no meaning - I doubt we can keep English alive if we permit its short and convenient words to be dominated by small cliques of researchers who don't talk to each other.
In other words, it's our 'job' to ensure that Paul Dawkins, Margaret Thatcher, Susan Blackmore, Liana Gabora and Paul Adler are all mentioned in at least one file, so that people can see various perspectives on this broad thing called "meme" - and do not have to accept "cultural evolution" first...
- I agree with this last...all those people should be mentioned, perhaps by adding a link at the bottom of the page to an essay, or their home page, or the names of books they have written. Our readers want to know where they can find Thatcher's ideas in her own words--they don't give a damn what you or I think about them, and they shouldn't. --LDC